Flowable products are often packaged in flexible bags, which are held in large steel drums sealed closed with their lids. This allows large quantities of the flowable products to be securely stored and transported to another location where the products can be removed, further processed and repackaged for the consumer. As an example, the flowable product can be a liquid or a particulate-containing liquid, such as juice concentrates (e.g., orange juice), fruit cocktail, yogurt and concentrated tomato paste. As a more specific example, for concentrated tomato paste, the large drum with the bag of tomato paste stored therein is transported to the customer's processing plant, the lid removed, the bag removed, an uncapping mechanism removes the bag cap, the paste is pumped out of the bag, processed into spaghetti sauce, repackaged (in bottles for example) and delivered to the retail stores.
During the transport of the drums with liquid-filled bags therein, the liquid tends to slosh back and forth in the bags. To minimize this sloshing action, dunnage (filler) is positioned in the container at the top of the bags to fill a head space region. The dunnage can be bubble wrap, cut-to-fit foam pieces, spray-type foam, flexible “peanuts,” or preformed conglomerate sponge pieces. The dunnage, while reducing the movement of the bag, does not prevent the wrinkling and flex cracking at the top of the bag, along the liquid “shoreline” in the bag. The flex cracking can cause pin hole breaks in the bag resulting in product leakage and/or possible product contamination. Furthermore, significant labor and material costs may be incurred when filling the container with dunnage. When using cut-to-fit foam as dunnage, the foam piece may require trimming for proper fitment into the head space region. Generally, the foam piece is oversized to reduce movement of the bag within the container so that an operator is required, usually with difficulty, to compress the foam piece before securing the lid onto the container.
Examples of the prior art are the following U.S. Pat. No. 3,169,690 (Scholle), U.S. Pat. No. 4,635,814 (Jones), U.S. Pat. No. 5,046,634 (McFarlin, et al.), U.S. Pat. No. 5,454,407 (Huja et al.) and U.S. Pat. No. 5,806,572 (Voller). The entire contents of each of these patents are hereby incorporated by reference.